We're not about to awaken an evil digital god — AI is far more likely to end in a great disappointment

Artificial intelligence (AI) terrifies us partly because it is new and partly because it is disturbingly familiar. We have invented machines that converse, flatter, argue and improvise with uncanny fluency. Confronted by this synthetic reflection, we behave like early humans seeing a mirror for the first time: We project consciousness behind the glass, then populate it with our expected behaviors, emotions, hopes and nightmares. In other words, we scare ourselves.

Today's frontier models are impressively good at writing, coding and math. Yet they still fail at ingredients of useful <...